Dunesen

Fast and Furious 6

The term ‘popcorn flick’ gets used too often as an excuse for movies that don’t try.

“Oh, it’s just a summer popcorn flick. Why do you have to complain about plotholes and stupid characters and the movie being big and dumb?”

(Not to harp on it, but I’ve seen people try to defend the new Star Trek movie with this argument, which, as I’ve said before, is exactly why I won’t watch it. Star Trek is not an action franchise.)

It’s unacceptable because there are plenty of blockbuster movies that are smart enough and don’t condescend to the audience. In a world with Terminator 2, The Matrix, the Bourne series, the Avengers and the other Marvel movies, Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, Raiders of the Lost Ark, [fill in your own favorite here] there’s no excuse for action blockbusters being too dumb, too lazy, or too loud and grating. There is a minimum level of artistry and competence we can demand of a summer blockbuster.

Or a movie can just go so far into the ridiculous, over-the-top territory that it out-distances any kind of critique. The purest work like this is the Crank movies, which I unabashedly love and consider brilliant in their own way.

Fast and Furious 6 approaches that mark, with action pieces that involve a tank driving down a Spanish freeway or a finale that involves the world’s longest runway, but it also has just enough restraint and gives just the right amount of attention to character interaction and storyline that, while the movie is big and dumb, it’s smart enough that it’s enjoyable without warranting the term “guilty pleasure.”

Because Fast and Furious 6 is, for all the jokes and groans the idea of a fifth sequel to “Point Break with cars instead of surfing” warrants, exactly what it needs to be to justify its existence. It’s fun, it’s funny, it’s exciting, and it has no delusions about reaching the level of greatness like T2 or The Dark Knight.

I have nothing to say about how the movie fits in to the series, because honestly I’ve only now seen half of them. I saw the first one, I enjoy it as a solid romp. I saw the fourth one, which wasn’t bad but wasn’t good or even all that memorable. And now I’ve seen the sixth, which unlike 1 and 4 is so wacky it’s hard to believe it’s in the same franchise. I guess the fifth one is when things just got really silly and the moviemakers said “fuck physics.”

I’m interested in seeing Fast 5 now, just to see if it’s as ridiculously fun as this one.

So yeah. This was exactly what I wanted it to be. Would I prefer more intelligent fare? Yes, but I can get that elsewhere. It is nice to have ridiculous, ‘not smart but neither is it dumb’ entertainment now and then.

WHY DON’T YOU WANT MY MONEY?!

(No, I’m not going to explain this.)

I’ve had Next Generation playing in the background all night. I’m still in season one, and while Wesley is as annoying as we all know he is I’m also struck by how pointless Troi is. Never considered it when I got into the show when I was a kid, but watching it now… she really has no reason to be there.

And it’s obvious because every episode tries to give all the characters at least one scene’s worth of dialogue, and the writers haven’t figure out how to balance the cast.

The Name of the Doctor

Watched it yesterday, enjoyed all the call-backs to the original series (even if i wish better special effects had been an option), but overall the episode left me… not as overwhelmed as everyone else seems to be.

The final moments are the only really grand part, for me. Loved that, want to see where this is going. But everything before that merely works (more or less), and when it was all said and done it felt like a lot of wheelspinning and padding.

What do I mean? Well, the title implied we were going to learn The Doctor’s actual name, which I never really believed would happen. Credit to Moffatt for the reversal of expectations and how the phrase of the title could mean different things. But because I never believed we would learn his name was ‘Percival Dunwoody’ or whatever the scene with needing to say his name to open the Tardis just dragged on, and the workaround (River’s hologram said it and we the audience didn’t hear it) seemed cheap.

On that note, I just want to say I am nowhere near as fond of River Song as her creator apparently is. Like her mother she strikes me as too smug and Moffatt is too pleased with how clever and cool he thinks she is. Not sure the story could have worked without her presence, but every time she starts talking I start to tune out.

I wish more time had been given to the Great Intelligence. Like the Silence last season, I find they had an interesting plan and were an adequate threat, but they weren’t built up much beyond ‘plot requirement.’ As in, the story needed a villain, needed a way to put the Doctor in danger and have Clara rescue him, and the GI stepped in to fill that role and do nothing else. I think it’s a flaw of the series as a whole that the villains are usually so single-minded that they exist as nothing but threats to be beaten. That gets tiresome.

Likewise, I wish we had gotten more of Trenzalore and more hints of what happened there, because I really liked the ‘scar tissue’ and the part about the Doctor’s timestream being open like that. But as far as that goes I expect we’ll get answers in the next episode(s). I can accept this episode was set-up for that.

Which brings us to the final moments and theories about what it all means. I have one main theory, certain to be wrong:

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